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Index of articles by wrter in the Atlantic story lede:
Dan Bogden, who served as the United States attorney from Nevada until he was abruptly dismissed from his
job during the infamous wave of firings of U.S. attorneys in late 2006, hoped to someday learn why he was let go. By most accounts, Bogden had served his community and the Department
of Justice with distinction: former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who had once directly supervised Bogden, would later
testify before Congress that Bogden was one of his best prosecutors, and that he could not understand why anyone would want
to fire him. But more than two years later, Bogden still has no official explanation as to why he was fired, or even
who made the decision. Two Justice Department watchdog units, the Office of Inspector General and the Office of Professional
Responsibility, studied the matter. For 17 months, from March 2007 to September 2008, lawyers there investigated the firings
of nine U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration. Last September, they released a 358-page report detailing their findings. The investigators talked to as many people involved in the firings as possible and exhaustively gathered information, but
senior officials from the Bush White House declined to answer their questions and the Bush White House refused to turn over relevant documents and emails. Even so, the final DOJ report contained enough information that most of the fired prosecutors
were able to learn key details about why they were dismissed and who was responsible. Dan Bogden got no such closure.
An entire chapter of the report was devoted to his firing, but it concluded only that investigators “could not determine
who was responsible for Bogden’s name being placed on the U.S. Attorney removal list.” His firing, if the accounts
of senior DOJ officials responsible for terminating him are to be believed, was one of Immaculate Conception. story lede: The
Justice Department is investigating whether former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales created a set of fictitious notes so
that President Bush would have a rationale for reauthorizing his warrantless eavedroopping program, according to sources close
to the investigation. President Bush reauthorized the surveillance program on March 11, 2004, one
day after the hospitalized Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to sign a certificate saying that the program was legal
and therefore continue. In reauthorizing the surveillance program over the objections
of his own Justice Department, President Bush later claimed to have relied on notes made by Gonzales about a meeting that
had taken place the day before (March 10), in which Gonzales and Vice President Cheney had met with eight congressional leaders—also
known as the “Gang of Eight”—who receive briefings about covert intelligence programs. According to Gonzales’s
notes, the congressional leaders had said in the meeting that they wanted the surveillance program to continue despite the
attorney general’s refusal to certify that it was legal. But four of the congressional
leaders present at the meeting say that’s not true; they never encouraged the White House to sidestep the objections of the attorney general and continue the program without
his approval. Investigators are skeptical of the notes because Gonzales did not write them until days after the
meeting with the congressional leaders, and he wrote them after both Bush and Gonzales had together signed a reauthorization
of the surveillance program. Gonzales, who was White House counsel at the time he met with the congressional leaders,
has told investigators working for the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General that President Bush personally
directed him to write the notes so that he could “memorialize” what the legislators had told him, according to
a report made public by the Inspector General’s Office on September 2 and sources close to the investigation. story lede: In
March, 2004, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales made us a now-famous late-night visit to the hospital room of Attorney General
John Ashcroft, seeking to get Ashcroft to sign a certification stating that the Bush administration's warantless wiretapping
program was legal According to people familiar with statements recently made by Gonzales to federal investigators, Gonzales
is now saying that George Bush personally direced him to make that hospital visit. The hospital
visit is already central to many contemporaneous historical accounts of the Bush presidency. At the time of the
visit, Ashcroft had been in intensive care for six days, was heavily medicated, and was recovering from emergency surgery
to remove his gall bladder. Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey has said that he believes that Gonzales and White
House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who accompanied Gonzales to Ashcroft's hospital room, were trying to take advantage of Ashcroft's
grievously ill state-- presisng him to sign the certification possibly witout even comprehending what he was doing-- and in
the process authorize a government surveillance program which both Ashcroft and the Justice Department had concluded was of
questionable legality.
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