Bud Cummins, the former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas who was fired in mid-2006 to make room for a protégé of Karl Rove, said he “regrets” that a special prosecutor will continue to probe the circumstances behind the federal prosecutor firings, but he realizes that unanswered questions about the issue remain.

“I think the people who screwed this up so royally and others around them have been adequately punished by lost jobs and reputation,” Cummins said in an email exchange, referring to Justice Department officials who resigned last year in the wake of the scandal. “But I understand and respect the recommendation that a prosecutor could find out more.”

On Monday, Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed Nora Dannehy, a federal prosecutor from Connecticut, to continue the investigation to determine whether any criminal laws were violated. She is expected to file a status report on the probe in 60 days.

Cummins said the 356-page report released Monday by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) “provides the first real chronological and cumulative narrative of events” related to the U.S. Attorney firings in 2006.

“I can’t think of any factual determinations that I think are clearly erroneous, though I am somewhat surprised by their willingness to conclude that there might have been some legitimate reasons to motivate even some of the firings when so little was done first by management to improve the inadequate performance,” he said.

The report, prepared by Inspector General Glenn Fine and OPR’s H. Marshall Jarrett based on an 18-month investigation, was highly critical of the way in which former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales ran the Justice Department. Fine and Jarrett said Gonzales was “remarkably unengaged” the plan to fire U.S. Attorneys and that he and his former deputy, Paul McNulty, “abdicated their responsibility.” The watchdogs said the firings were clearly a result of partisan politics.

Gonzales’s former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, who oversaw the firings, was excoriated in the report for having engaged in “misconduct” by misleading Congress about the true reasons behind the firings.

Sampson and McNulty claimed that the federal prosecutors performed poorly and they were fired as a result. However, the report concluded that Cummins’ dismissal came about to accommodate Timothy Griffin. Griffin was Karl Rove’s deputy at the White House Office of Political Affairs. Griffin resigned as interim U.S. Attorney last year.

“Sampson included Cummins as one of many “weak U.S. Attorneys” on his first removal list in March 2005,” according to the Fine and Jarrett’s report. “When we interviewed Sampson, he said that he could not recall specifically why he identified Cummins for potential removal on this list.  Sampson said he felt that Cummins was mediocre and an underperformer, although he also said he could not recall learning anything specific about Cummins’s performance between 2001 and 2005 that would have supported this belief.

“Sampson acknowledged that his view of Cummins was colored by information he gained from Cummins’s nomination process, not from Cummins’s performance as U.S. Attorney. While Sampson told us that he thought other Department managers also viewed Cummins’s performance as
mediocre, none of the Department managers we interviewed confirmed this or said they had provided such an assessment to Sampson. In fact, several of the Department’s senior managers… told us they did not hear anything negative about Cummins’s performance.”

The report said one of the more “troubling” aspects of Griffin’s firing came in the February 23 response to a letter from several Senators raising concerns about Cummins’s removal.”

“The [DOJ's] February 23 letter, drafted by Sampson and circulated to various Department senior managers and the White House, made three significant misleading statements,” according to the report. “The first was that “It was well known as early as December 2004 that Mr. Cummins intended to leave…” In fact, as noted above, Cummins had simply said it would not be shocking for him to leave before the end of President Bush’s second term.”

“The second concerned the timing of when the White House first contemplated Griffin’s appointment and when the final decision was made to appoint Griffin,” the report says. “The letter stated that “the decision to have Mr. Griffin replace Mr. Cummins was first contemplated in the spring or summer of 2006 [and] the final decision to appoint Mr. Griffin . . . was made on or about December 15…”  In fact, as discussed above, Griffin’s appointment was contemplated earlier than that, and the Department decided to appoint him to be the U.S. Attorney much earlier than December 15, 2006.

“The third misleading statement in the letter was that “The Department is not aware of Karl Rove playing any role in the decision to appoint Mr. Griffin.”  “This statement is contradicted by the evidence described in this chapter which indicated that Rove was involved in the decision to appoint Griffin and that Sampson was aware of that fact.

“The statement is also contradicted by Sampson’s own e-mail on December 19 to Associate White House Counsel Chris Oprison in which Sampson wrote, “I’m not 100 percent sure that Tim was the guy on which to test drive this authority, but know that getting him appointed was important to [former White House counsel] Harriet [Miers], Karl, etc.”  While Sampson later explained this e-mail by stating that he “assumed” but did not know that Rove was involved in the decision to appoint Griffin, we found this justification unpersuasive and belied by the evidence.”

Cummins said he is “mostly comfortable” with the report’s conclusion related to his firing.

“In the overall context of the thing, it is difficult for me to give Kyle Sampson or [the Justice Department's White House liaison] Monica Goodling sufficient credibility to believe that even their most straightforward decisions were made for legitimate purposes in spite of some colored up facts of legitimacy,” Cummins said. “I concur with the suggestions that the “bad acts” were committed by staffers like Sampson, and Gonzales’s crime was simply for failing to know or understand what was going on before, during or after.”

He said he was not surprised to learn how Sara Taylor, the former director of the White House Office of Political Affairs, came to refer to Cummins as “lazy” in an email and how that characterization was used to justify his firing.

According to the report, Taylor told the DOJ’s investigators that it was possible that she received a negative impression of Cummins from Griffin, but she said she did not believe that he was her only source.”

Taylor “stated that because Griffin was on her staff, she talked to “tons of Arkansans” who visited the White House whenever they were in Washington,” according to the report. “Taylor said she likely gained her impression of Cummins through a combination of information from Griffin and from other Arkansas attorneys.”

Griffin, who was involved in a massive effort to suppress votes during the 2004 presidential election, told DOJ investigators “he did not remember ever telling Taylor that Cummins was lazy.”

“Griffin said he did not personally believe Cummins was lazy,” the report says. “However, he said that he had heard similar comments about Cummins from other people and was sure he had passed on the comments. Griffin admitted that in 2005 and 2006 he might have made negative comments about Cummins to Sampson, Taylor, and others along the lines of complaining about Cummins’s failure to get another job.”

Cummins said Taylor’s comment “only confirmed what everyone else already knew: the only person that she had contact with that could have professed to have an opinion about my work ethic was [Tim Griffin.]“

At the end of the day, the report said Sampson and other DOJ officials engaged in what amounted to a cover-up regarding the reasons Cummins was fired. 

“In sum, we concluded that Cummins was not removed for performance reasons, as initially suggested by the [Justice] Department,” the report says. “His performance was never evaluated, and no department leader had suggested that Cummins’s performance was lacking. Rather, the evidence shows that the main reason for Cummins’s removal, and the timing for his removal, was to provide a position for former White House employee Griffin.”