Washington – Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty portrayed himself Thursday as largely out of the loop in the Justice Department’s firings of U.S. attorneys and said he initially questioned whether they were appropriate.
McNulty, testifying in front of a House panel investigating the dismissals of eight federal prosecutors, said he was cut out of some of the department’s most important personnel decisions, including ones his office is supposed to oversee.
House Judiciary chairman John Conyers said McNulty’s claim of ignorance “begs credibility.” McNulty, who is resigning at the end of the summer, told a House Judiciary subcommittee that he learned of the plan to fire the prosecutors in late October, about six weeks before they were ordered to quit.
In a transcript of testimony he previously gave the panel, handed out at Thursday’s hearing, the Justice Department’s No. 2 official indicated he was not entirely comfortable with the plans then.
“I have to say I was somewhat surprised,” McNulty said in the transcript. “I remember having kind of a mixed set of reactions, one of being surprised by the fact that this was going to take place, but switching my thinking to, OK, if that is what the folks who do the personnel stuff are intending to do here, what do I think about these individuals and do I have an objection?”
In May, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he relied on McNulty more than any other adviser to decide which U.S. attorneys should be fired, and was reassured by his deputy as recently as March that the purge was justified.
McNulty agreed he ultimately concurred with the plan. He told lawmakers that Kyle Sampson, the attorney general’s former chief of staff, compiled the list with input from other officials. McNulty said he never deliberately misled a Senate panel in February over the firings, insisting his testimony then was accurate based on the facts as he knew them at the time.
Additionally, McNulty described himself as concerned that he had been deliberately cut out of a March 2006 order, as documents show, giving Sampson and former department White House liaison Monica Goodling authority to hire or fire about 135 politically appointed employees.
“I’m drawing an inference that you were zoned out of this process,” said Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass. “It’s my belief that you were thrown under the bus.”
