McNulty Gets Knife in the Back

Kelli Arena: "The White House is saying, 'Look, we don't think this is connected to this U.S. attorney issue. We're going to take him at his word. He says it's for personal reasons. Let it be.'"

Some McNulty Background

Massimo Calabresi wrote for Time last week about the real reason administration officials were mad at McNulty dating back to his Feb. 6 congressional testimony. In an e-mail sent Feb. 7, 2007, by Gonzales' spokesman Brian Roehrkasse, Roehrkasse "told two top Gonzales aides that the Attorney General was 'extremely upset' that his deputy, Paul McNulty, had told the Senate Judiciary committee the day before that one of the attorneys, Bud Cummins of Arkansas, had been fired to make room for an aide to Karl Rove.

"'When the Roehrkasse e-mail came to light, he told the press that Gonzales had been upset because he believed that 'Bud Cummins' removal involved performance considerations.' But on April 15, Congressional sources tell Time, Gonzales' former chief of staff Kyle Sampson told a different story. During a private interview with Judiciary Committee staffers Sampson said three times in as many minutes that Gonzales was angry with McNulty because he had exposed the White House's involvement in the firings -- had put it's role 'in the public sphere,' as Sampson phrased it, according to Congressional sources familiar with the interview.'"

And in today's Times, Johnston writes that it wasn't just Gonzales who was angry on that count: "White House aides complained privately that Mr. McNulty's testimony gave Democrats a significant opening to demand more testimony from the Justice Department and presidential aides. Several aides said he should have been combative in defending the dismissals."

But after his initial testimony, McNulty didn't exactly go out of his way to set the record straight. Quite the contrary.

Michael Isikoff wrote in Newsweek last week that McNulty attended the controversial emergency White House meeting on March 5 at which Karl Rove and other aides discussed what Justice officials should tell Congress about the firings.

And Murray Waas wrote in the National Journal on May 3 that McNulty's chief of staff "told congressional investigators that phone calls he placed to four fired U.S. attorneys -- calls that three of the prosecutors say involved threats about testifying before Congress -- were made at McNulty's direction....

"At least one member of Congress has questioned whether the phone calls might constitute obstruction of justice."

Opinion Watch

Josh Marshall blogs for Talking Points Memo: "If I were Gonzales and the White House, I'd see McNulty's departure as a very unwelcome development. Behind the scenes, supporters of McNulty and Gonzales have been increasingly at odds as the scandal has progressed -- with McNulty's supporters saying he wasn't kept in the loop and that that the Gonzales clique is made of crooks and the Gonzales supporters (read: Sampson, Goodling, Elston, et al.) saying McNulty let the cat out of the bag in his testimony earlier in the year. . . .

"A lot of this is tea leaf reading, trying to figure out who's spilling and who's not. But it's hard to figure where McNulty gets less forthcoming once he's no longer part of the administration."

Andrew Cohen blogs for washingtonpost.com: "Like his boss the Attorney General of the United States, McNulty knew or should have known that the White House-inspired plan to politicize the Justice Department was wrong; knew or should have known that good, honest, smart federal prosecutors all across the country were unconscionably being sacked in favor of partisan cronies; knew or should have known that the Justice Department is not supposed to be a political fiefdom to be manipulated at the whim of party loyalists or bureaucratic hacks. Even more so than Alberto Gonzales, McNulty, a former federal prosecutor himself, should have stood up for the independence and authority of the prosecutors who were fired. . . .

"The relatively quick derailment of the McNulty Express -- which had been on a fast track to a federal judgeship or more -- is another sign that this U.S. Attorney scandal is bigger and deeper than Administration apologists would try to have you believe. It strips away another layer of protection from the Attorney General himself and reveals even more than before deep and intense fault lines at the Justice Department. And if McNulty truly is upset with the way Gonzales and Company treated him after the controversy broke, then it is possible that we will soon see McNulty come back to Capitol Hill for another round of testimony, this time as a private citizen given (I believe) a grant of immunity. If that happens, watch out."