On the Firing Line

"Here was a guy that was really bright and not 'polished' in the pejorative sense, but he was articulate and sharp, and frankly, people loved his work," Bradshaw said.

It was in this legal boot camp, a place where clerks get hands-on experience in the drafting of decisions, that Bradshaw, then a bachelor, and the Sampsons became inseparable: going to Braves games in Atlanta on weekends, playing Trivial Pursuit and eating Noelle's unbelievably good desserts and, to her dismay, talking about law long into the night. After a brief stint in private practice at a Salt Lake City law firm, Sampson came to Washington in 1999 to work as counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee for a man he will face tomorrow, Orrin Hatch. Before long, Sampson joined the Bush transition team following the contested 2000 election. His former law school classmate Elizabeth Cheney, daughter of the vice president, had suggested him for the job, according to a report in the Salt Lake Tribune.

It was during those frantic, compressed weeks of putting together an entire administration that Sampson grew close to Gonzales, who had been Bush's attorney general in Texas, and followed him to the White House counsel's office. In one interview, Sampson said he admired the president because Bush believed that "public virtue and religious values have an appropriate place in public government." The new associate counsel settled into suburban life. The Sampsons and their three children live in Arlington and worship at Crystal City Ward in Alexandria. He runs marathons and has completed several; last year in Richmond he finished in 4 hours 21 minutes.

Very quickly, Sampson drew the attention of others within the administration. By 2003, Ashcroft wooed Sampson to Justice, where he became an integral part of Ashcroft's team -- traveling with the attorney general as he crisscrossed the country talking to members of the Drug Enforcement Agency, U.S. marshals and, yes, U.S. attorneys. Described as the person who kept things loose while people fielded cellphone calls nonstop and scrolled continually through their BlackBerrys, after a long day, Sampson would often sit at the hotel bar sipping ice water while his colleagues drank beer.

"He was very skilled," said Ashcroft's chief of staff, David Ayres. "He got things done the right way. He's very disciplined and has a high level of integrity. Yes, he's a good lawyer, but in addition he can make an entity that has 120,000 people run, and that's another set of skills."

When Gonzales succeeded Ashcroft as attorney general, Sampson rose in Justice to become Gonzales's chief of staff. Then last year, his former boss, Hatch, supported someone else as the next U.S. attorney in Utah. Whether Sampson's disappointment affected his handling of the dismissal of the eight U.S. attorneys is unclear. What is perfectly visible, though, is the vigor he brought to the task as he tried to implement the doctrine that Democrats suggest has been directed by top-level White House officials. Above all, according to people who agreed to talk for this article, Sampson valued loyalty and seemed ready to judge that quality in others, to determine who were "loyal Bushies."

To establish the criteria for those loyal Bushies, Sampson established a rating system for the "performance" of the country's U.S. attorneys and recommended to then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers that a "limited number of U.S. attorneys could be targeted for removal and replacement, mitigating the shock to the system that would result from an across the board firing." And it was Sampson, when presented with a plea from one targeted prosecutor, who quipped in an e-mail, "In the 'you won't believe this category,' Paul Charlton would like a few minutes of the AG's time."

Perhaps more than anything, Sampson's subsequent resignation speaks loudly to the very concept of what it means to be loyal in Washington today. Though sometimes flip in his correspondence, Sampson also appears as a man who's immersed in the mechanics of his task, providing the best possible logistics to carry out a higher mission. "He showed an enormous amount of loyalty," said Corallo, the former Justice public affairs director, "and ended up being attacked unfairly and unjustly by the people for whom he was being loyal."

This loyalty seems to be a hard thing for Sampson to shake. Even following his resignation, Sampson's attorney, Brad Berenson, insisted in a public statement that "Kyle did not resign because he had misled anyone at the Justice Department or withheld information concerning the replacement of the U.S. attorneys. He resigned," Berenson said, "because, as chief of staff, he felt he had let the attorney general down in failing to appreciate the need for and organize a more effective political response to the unfounded accusations of impropriety in the replacement process."

It is one of the hardest falls in political Washington, when the rapid climber winds up at the hearing table. When Sampson willingly comes before the Senate Judiciary Committee tomorrow, he will come alone, with his former teammates nowhere around.