Whitehouse: ‘You Can Safely Bet’ The List Of Fired Attorneys Came From The White House

Earlier this week, ThinkProgress sat down with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and asked him whether he believes the plan for purging U.S. attorneys originated from the Bush White House.
Whitehouse explained that tracking down who conceived of the list of fired U.S. attorneys was made much more difficult due to new rules employed by the Bush administration that greatly expanded the number of DoJ and White House employees that could talk to one another about criminal cases. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in April, Whitehouse forced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to admit previous firewalls between White House and DoJ staff had been torn down, allowing at least 400 White House officials and over 30 Justice officials to have discussions with one another about criminal cases.
Whitehouse told ThinkProgress why that matters:
WHITEHOUSE: So a Karl Rove to Kyle Sampson call about a case would have been out of bounds under the rules that had been developed for decades. Under the Bush Administration, they knocked down the rules, so there’s so many opportunities for that infiltration it’s hard to know where it came from. And that’s why I think we need to continue to pursue the investigation. By process of elimination if nobody in the Department of Justice knows where the list came from, then it may not have come from within the Department of Justice; it may have come from somewhere else. And given the likelihood here — it probably didn’t come from Congress; it probably didn’t come from the Governor of Iowa or, you know, the Mayor of Detroit. You can pretty well safely bet that the place that it came from was the White House.

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