Dan Bogden, one the nine U.S. attorneys infamously axed by the Bush Administration, may never get to the bottom of his mysterious firing. But he just might soon have his old job back.
by Murray Waas
A U.S. Attorney's Story
Dan Bogden, who served as the United States attorney from Nevada until he was abruptly dismissed from his job during the infamous wave of firings of U.S. attorneys in late 2006, hoped to someday learn why he was let go. By most accounts, Bogden had served his community and the Department of Justice with distinction: former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who had once directly supervised Bogden, would later testify before Congress that Bogden was one of his best prosecutors, and that he could not understand why anyone would want to fire him.
But more than two years later, Bogden still has no official explanation as to why he was fired, or even who made the decision.
Two Justice Department watchdog units, the Office of Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility, studied the matter. For 17 months, from March 2007 to September 2008, lawyers there investigated the firings of nine U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration. Last September, they released a 358-page report detailing their findings. The investigators talked to as many people involved in the firings as possible and exhaustively gathered information, but senior officials from the Bush White House declined to answer their questions and the Bush White House refused to turn over relevant documents and emails. Even so, the final DOJ report contained enough information that most of the fired prosecutors were able to learn key details about why they were dismissed and who was responsible.
Dan Bogden got no such closure. An entire chapter of the report was devoted to his firing, but it concluded only that investigators “could not determine who was responsible for Bogden’s name being placed on the U.S. Attorney removal list.” His firing, if the accounts of senior DOJ officials responsible for terminating him are to be believed, was one of Immaculate Conception.
At the time of the firings, Alberto Gonzalez was attorney general. His chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, was in charge of compiling the list of names of U.S. attorneys to be fired – allegedly for poor performance (though those involved later admitted the firings were in fact made for political reasons). In interviews with investigators, according to the Justice Department report, Sampson “acknowledged that he must have physically placed Bogden’s name on the list.” But Sampson “denied that he made the decision to add Bogden to the list,” and asserted that “he did not remember who made the recommendation.”
Deputy attorney general Paul McNulty, who was the second highest-ranking official in the Department at the time, told investigators that he too "did not know why Bogden’s name was on the list of U.S. Attorneys to be removed.”
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http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200904u/us-attorney-bogden
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