Legal News

Power Play Led to Prosecutor?s Ouster; How Not to Fire a U.S. Attorney

By Dan Slater

The machinations of the U.S. Attorney Mess have been teased out a bit by a series of OIG reports, but the circumstances surrounding the individual firings of nine U.S. Attorneys remain mostly a mystery.

But now, thanks to a story today in the Washington Post, we get an idea of the events that allegedly led to the ouster of former U.S. attorney Todd Graves, who arguably went on to bigger and better things as the attorney for Zach Scruggs, son of Dickie. Zach was slapped with a 14 month prison sentence in July after pleading guilty to misprision of a felony in connection with the bribing of a state judge.

Ultimately, according to the WaPo story, it was a petty political spat between the office of Missouri Senator Christopher S. Bond and the office of Graves’s brother, U.S. congressman Sam Graves, that got Graves booted from his U.S. attorney post. From the story:

In a telephone call, an aide [to Bond] angrily warned Graves that if he did not intervene on Bond’s behalf — against his brother’s chief of staff [Jeff Roe] — the senator “could no longer protect [his] job.” Graves refused, and a little over a year later, he was bounced from his Kansas City office after Bond’s staff made repeated complaints to the White House counsel’s office. . .Although the report does not identify the caller, multiple sources told The Washington Post it was Roe’s archrival, Jason Van Eaton, the chief of staff for Bond’s Missouri office.

Van Eaton and Roe, a longtime Republican political operative, are roughly the same age, and each sought an influential reputation, the sources said. Their bosses worked well together, but for the two aides “it was all about personality clashes, who is the more important and powerful staffer,” said a Republican who knows the two.

Senator Bond issued a brief statement Tuesday apologizing to “the people of Missouri” and to Graves, saying had “no knowledge of my staff’s action, did not approve it and would not have approved it.” Van Eaton, who is now a political consultant told the Post he doesn’t remember “any conversation like that from four years ago.”

Todd Graves told WaPo: “if I can lose my prosecutor’s job over something as silly as this, it wasn’t worth having. I think it diminishes the entire institution.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on October 03, 2008 (boomark / email).