Two thirds of Americans, including a narrow majority of Republicans, see political motivations behind last year's firings of eight chief federal prosecutors. But the nation is deeply divided along partisan lines about whether Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales should lose his job over the scandal.
The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that Gonzales faces a broadly critical public as well as Congressional scrutiny about the firings of the U.S. attorneys.
Gonzales wrote a column in the Outlook section of The Washington Post yesterday describing his role in the matter; he testifies tomorrow before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In the poll, 67 percent said they believed the prosecutors were fired by the Justice Department for political reasons, not on the basis of their performance. About eight in 10 Democrats and two-thirds of independents said they saw political motivations behind the firings of the U.S. attorneys, an attitude shared by 53 percent of all Republicans surveyed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/16/AR2007041600422.html?hpid=topnews