Another Attorneygate Resignation
Posted on | June 16, 2007
Quietly handing in his notice on Friday afternoon—effective a week later—was Mike Elston, a chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, bringing to five the number of (apparently) Attorneygate-related resignations from the Department of Justice.
Some highlights from Elston’s tenure at DoJ:
– He allegedly called three of the fired U.S. attorneys and made an implicit threat that the Justice Department would detail the reasons for their firings if they didn’t stay quiet.
– He allegedly rejected a large number of applicants to Justice Department positions because they were Democrats.
– When Carol Lam, the former U.S. attorney for San Diego, asked to stay on the job longer in order to deal with some outstanding prosecutions (the expanding Duke Cunningham case among them), Elston told her not to think about her cases, that she should be gone in “weeks, not months” and said “these instructions were ‘coming from the very highest levels of the government.’”
– He called around to the U.S. attorneys whom he had placed on one of the draft firing lists to apologize when he discovered that his list would be turned over to Congress.
What a mess Republican cronyism has made of the DoJ!
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