Number of Fired Prosecutors Grows

The brother of Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), Todd Graves is a former state prosecutor and was a GOP candidate for state treasurer. The Bush administration installed him as the chief federal prosecutor for western Missouri in 2001.

The same month he was asked to step down, Graves's name was included in a Jan. 9, 2006, list assembled by Gonzales's then-chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, of seven U.S. attorneys the administration was considering forcing from their jobs. That April, Sampson sent another e-mail noting that two of the prosecutors on that list had already left. Three names, including Graves's, were redacted when Justice officials released the January list.

Graves said yesterday that he never knew he was on the list and was not given a specific reason he was asked to leave.

During the spring of 2005, an aide to Bond urged the White House to replace Graves, because the prosecutor's wife and brother-in-law recently had been given state patronage contracts to run private offices for driver's licenses and other motor vehicle services. A spokeswoman for Bond confirmed that interaction but said Justice officials later told the senator's staff that the contracts issue was not why the administration wanted him to leave.

Graves acknowledged that he had twice during the past few years clashed with Justice's civil rights division over cases, including a federal lawsuit involving Missouri's voter rolls that Graves said a Washington Justice official signed off on after he refused to do so. That official, Bradley J. Schlozman, was appointed as interim U.S. attorney to succeed Graves, remaining for a year until the Senate this spring confirmed John Wood for the job. Wood was a counselor to the deputy attorney general and is a son of Bond's first cousin, although the senator's spokeswoman, Shana Marchio, said Bond did not recommend him for the job.

Schlozman had been a controversial figure in Justice's civil rights division for stances on voting rights. After he arrived in Kansas City, he came under fire from Democrats for pushing forward with an indictment of voter-registration activists in Missouri just weeks before last November's elections. Now a lawyer for the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, Schlozman was tentatively scheduled to testify next Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Justice and legislative aides said yesterday that Schlozman has requested more time to prepare his testimony.

In Gonzales's prepared statement for today's House hearing, the attorney general refers three times to the resignations of eight prosecutors. In his remarks last month in the Senate, he also referred to "every U.S. attorney who was asked to resign," and then proceeded to name the eight who had previously been identified as having been fired.

Most of Gonzales's prepared remarks for today are identical to those he delivered last month in the Senate, including an apology for the way the firings were handled along with strong assertions that "nothing improper" occurred during the dismissals. Gonzales will also reassert that he did not identify any of the prosecutors to be removed and will lay much of the responsibility for the process on his former chief of staff, according to his statement.

"I should have done more personally to ensure that the review process was more rigorous and that each U.S. attorney was informed of this decision in a more personal and respectful way," Gonzales says in the prepared statement.

The attorney general's reprised themes come despite new allegations and developments in recent weeks that have provided further challenges to earlier claims by Gonzales and other Justice officials. Officials announced last week, for example, that former Gonzales aide Monica M. Goodling faces an internal Justice Department probe into whether she violated federal law or department rules by considering political affiliation in reviewing the hiring of career prosecutors.

Rep. Linda T. Sanchez (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Judiciary subcommittee, said she is "not unduly optimistic" that Gonzales will be more forthcoming with his answers to Democratic questions about who was responsible for putting names of prosecutors on the firing lists.

Washingtonpost.com staff writer Paul Kane contributed to this report.