WASHINGTON — The dismissal of eight United States attorneys has elicited a long and ever-growing list of theories by Democrats on Capitol Hill about ulterior motives and suspicious coincidences. Now there is a new one: the document gap.
Democrats on Capitol Hill were privately urging reporters on Wednesday to press the Bush administration to explain why in the thousands of pages of e-mail messages and documents turned over to investigators, there is almost nothing from Nov. 16 to Dec. 7, the day seven of the firings occurred. In contrast, there are hundreds of pages from the weeks after the dismissals. One of the last e-mail messages before this period was sent by D. Kyle Sampson, then chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, to Harriet E. Miers, then the White House counsel, and includes a request that the White House approve the plan. “We’ll stand by for a green light from you,” said the Nov. 15 e-mail message.
A little more than a half-hour later, Ms. Miers replied: “Not sure whether this will be determined to require the boss’s attention. If it does, he just left last night so would not be able to accomplish that for some time.”
It is not known whether Ms. Miers was referring to Mr. Bush.
White House travel records show that Mr. Bush was traveling for most of the next two weeks. Mr. Sampson did not receive authorization for the firings until Dec. 4.
An e-mail message that day to Mr. Sampson from Ms. Miers’s office said: “We’re a go for the US Atty plan. WH leg, political, and communications have signed off and acknowledge that we have to be committed to following through once the pressure comes.”
From Nov. 16 to Dec. 7, there are only a handful of e-mail messages, a fact that Talking Points Memo, a Web site that has been following the furor with microscopic attention, pointed out Wednesday morning.
“Shades of Rose Mary Woods? An 18-day gap?” said a posting by the blog’s owner, Joshua Micah Marshall, referring to President Richard M. Nixon’s secretary, who found herself on the spot after the discovery that 18 1/2 minutes of crucial White House tapes had been erased.
Asked Wednesday about the apparent gap in the documents, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, referred the question to the Justice Department.
Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said, “The department has provided or made available to Congress all the documents responsive to Congress’s requests over the time period in question.” He added, “To the extent there was a lull in communications concerning the U.S. attorney issues, it reflects the fact that we have found no responsive documents from that time period, which included the Thanksgiving holiday.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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