Friday, April 27, 2007

Administration targeted another U.S. attorney.


This one is USA Thomas Heffelfinger:
“The Bush administration considered firing the former U.S. attorney in Minnesota, but he left his job voluntarily before the list of attorneys to be ousted was completed.” Thomas Heffelfinger’s case interests congressional investigators “because he worked in one of the states that White House political adviser Karl Rove identified as an election battleground, and…was replaced by a 34-year-old Bush administration loyalist who’d been a member of Gonzales’ inner circle.”


Thomas Heffelfinger's name on a version of the list that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' former chief of staff, Kyle Sampson,

Just a couple of problems with this story. Heffelfinger resigned without a job waiting for him. As dKos'
Halcyon noted, he didn't get another job until June.

Heffelfinger said he resigned because he needed to earn more $, yet his new position in the

private sector wasn't announced until June 2006 (He resigned in February, barely a month after the Abramoff guilty plea.) Heffelfinger had been the head of the Native American Interest Section of DoJ, a subset of USAs who dealt with Indian cases. In a December 2006 article he noted the fact that 5 of the Gonzales 8 were members of NAIS (he makes 6), including Margaret Chiara, who had been named to replace him (perhaps because they were already planning to force her out, thus 'churning' the USAs on NAIS in order to stall cases involved with Abramoff, Griles and the oil/gas-extraction companies who've been getting away without paying royalties).
Paulose spent her 2 months at DoJ in the Civil Rights division, no doubt being trained in minority voter suppression.

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