Drama! Just when you think there couldn’t possibly be more to the U.S. attorney firing scandal from the last administration, The Washington Post comes out with new details today.

Former White House counsel Harriet Miers told members of a House committee that former advisor Karl Rove was not happy with the job former U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias was doing investigating key Democratic lawmakers who were in hotly contested elections against GOP challengers. Miers said Rove was “agitated” by the slow progression of the corruption cases, and told her in 2006 that Iglesias as a “serious problem” and said he wanted “something done” about it, the Post reports. The conversation came months before Iglesias was let go, Miers told lawmakers. He was one of nine U.S. attorneys fired under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and house lawmakers have been investigating whether the dismissals were politically motivated.

Miers comments come from transcripts of testimony she gave to the House Judiciary Committee. She did not comment for the Post story, but Rove did, saying he “never sought to influence the conduct of any prosecution” and accusing Democrats of making “false accusations and partisan innuendoes.”

House Judiciary Committee Chairman saw it differently. “Under the Bush regime, honest and well-performing U.S. attorneys were fired for petty patronage, political horse-trading, and, in the most egregious case of political abuse of the U.S. attorney corps — that of U.S. attorney Iglesias — because he refused to use his office to help Republicans win elections,” Conyers said Tuesday.

More here from the Post.

The information comes from hundreds of documents released by the Judiciary Committee Tuesday. More here from Reuters.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Congress, Department of Justice, White House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.