How Political Warfare in Missouri Led to Prosecutor\'s Firing

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This is what former U.S. attorney Todd P. Graves discovered when hewas ousted in January 2006 by the Justice Department . He got his first inkling of trouble in 2004 not from thedepartment, but from an aide to Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), whose office was then embroiled in a bitter dispute withGraves's brother, a U.S. congressman.
In a telephone call, the aide angrily warned Graves that if he didnot intervene on Bond's behalf -- against his brother's chief ofstaff -- the senator "could no longer protect [his] job."Graves refused, and a little over a year later, he was bounced fromhis Kansas City office after Bond's staff made repeated complaintsto the White House counsel's office.
Some new details of this warfare are spelled out in a report thisweek from the Justice Department's inspector general thatilluminates how a coterie of relatively young department officials,working with White House lawyers and senior political officials,allowed the hiring and firing of U.S. prosecutors such as Graves tobe utterly corrupted.
H.E. "Bud" Cummins and David C. Iglesias , U.S. attorneys in Arkansas and New Mexico, respectively, alsowere ousted partly because of political pressures, the reportsuggests. Key participants attempted to cover their acts by lyingto members of Congress and the media, it says. A politicallyembarrassing uproar ensued, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales resigned under fire last August.
But the triviality of the dispute that led to Graves's ouster,described in the report as a split between Bond and Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.) over how to "run business" in Missouri politics,suggests that in the early part of Bush's second term the JusticeDepartment's top officials were more interested in political gain-- or political favors -- than the neutral pursuit of justice.
"What adult acts like this?" asked Melanie Sloan , executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington , a nonprofit watchdog group. "Senators are not spoiledchildren who can lash out on the playground . . . when they don'tget their way. U.S. attorneys are not toadies for their Senatesponsors, they are federal law enforcement officials."
Bond, who refused to be questioned about the episode byinvestigators, emphasized in a letter to Inspector General Glenn A. Fine that he made no calls himself about Todd Graves . He issued a brief statement Tuesday apologizing to "thepeople of Missouri" and to Graves, saying had "noknowledge of my staff's action, did not approve it and would nothave approved it."
Graves's ouster at the request of Bond's aides surprised manyMissourians because he had worked on one of Bond's Senate races andhad been an assistant state attorney before Bond sponsored him in2001 for the federal prosecutor's job. A Justice Departmentinspection report in 2002 called him well-regarded.
But then he got caught in the crossfire between Bond's office andhis brother's staff. It came to a head when the Bond aide demandedin October 2004 that Todd Graves persuade his brother to fire JeffRoe, then his chief of staff. Although the report does not identifythe caller, multiple sources told The Washington Post it was Roe's archrival, Jason Van Eaton, the chief of staff forBond's Missouri office.
Van Eaton and Roe, a longtime Republican political operative, areroughly the same age, and each sought an influential reputation,the sources said. Their bosses worked well together, but for thetwo aides "it was all about personality clashes, who is themore important and powerful staffer," said a Republican whoknows the two.
They became foes in 2004 partly because Roe was then assisting aRepublican congressional candidate who was challenging a longtimeBond ally, former Kansas City mayor Emanuel Cleaver II , according to a source familiar with the episode. They alsodisagreed over which official -- Bond or Rep. Graves -- deservedprincipal credit for obtaining a highway construction grant fornorthern Missouri, and over sharing a database of voter opinionscompiled by Graves's office, two other Republican sources said.