John McKay, the former US attorney for the Western District of Washington, pieced together thousands of pages of internal Justice Department (DOJ) emails, reviewed public documents and pored through hundreds of pages of sworn testimony his former boss, Alberto Gonzales, gave to Congress about the firings of at least nine US attorneys nearly two years ago.
McKay said evidence in the public record demonstrates the former attorney general and his underlings may well have obstructed justice.
McKay was one of the nine US attorneys fired in December 2006 for reasons that appear to be politically motivated. The DOJ's inspector general, Glenn Fine, is conducting an investigation to determine whether Gonzales perjured himself before Congress or sought to influence the testimony of Monica Goodling, the DOJ's former White House liaison who used a political litmus test to hire and fire attorneys, and resigned in disgrace last year. McKay said that a special prosecutor should be appointed to further probe the circumstances behind the US attorney firings if the inspector general's report determines federal laws may have been broken.
In an article published in the Seattle University Law Review, Mckay said the firing of at least two US attorneys, David Iglesias of New Mexico, and Carol Lam of San Diego, appears to demonstrate Gonzales and top DOJ officials may have obstructed justice by interfering with public corruption cases and ongoing criminal investigations Iglesias and Lam had been involved in at the time of their dismissals.
In his Law Review article, and at the conference, McKay singled out Iglesias's firing saying it could result in "criminal charges" against Gonzales and other former senior DOJ officials "for impeding justice."
"The elements of a prima facie case of obstruction of justice are: (1) the existence of the judicial proceeding; (2) knowledge of or notice of the judicial proceeding; (3) acting 'corruptly' with intent to influence, obstruct or impede the proceeding in the due administration of justice; and (4) a nexus (although not necessarily one which is material) between the judicial proceeding sought to be corruptly influenced and the defendant's efforts," McKay writes in a 34-page article. "The [federal] omnibus clause is a 'catchall' provision, which is broadly construed to include a wide variety of corrupt methods."
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