Another senior DOJ official, Michael Elston, has resigned. According to a DOJ anonymous source, Elston has accepted a job at a Washington law firm and his last day at the scandal-laden DOJ is next Friday.
McClatchy Washington Bureau:
Michael Elston, chief of staff to Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, became the fifth department official to leave his post since the controversy over the firings rocked the nation's top law enforcement agency....
... Elston's name first surfaced when one of the fired U.S. attorneys, Bud Cummins of Arkansas, disclosed in March that Elston had phoned him to suggest that senior department officials would retaliate against the prosecutors if they discussed their firings publicly.
In an e-mail written to five of the ousted U.S. attorneys minutes after the Elston call, Cummins said of the conversation: "I was tempted to challenge him and say something movie-like such as `are you threatening ME???'"
The department denied that Elston was trying to intimidate or silence the dismissed U.S. attorneys.
Elston's name also showed up on numerous e-mails in which department officials weighed which U.S. attorneys to fire. In one e-mail, he was informed about how the department would deal with the fallout from the firings.
In recent testimony, the former interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Bradley Schlozman, disclosed that he sought approval from Elston before bringing indictments for voter-registration fraud against four workers for a liberal-leaning group [ACORN] just days before the 2006 election. Department policy discourages such prosecutions on the eve of elections.
Elston's boss, McNulty, announced recently that he would leave his job at the end of the summer.Paul Kiel itemizes some of Elston's "hit jobs" at the DOJ :
-- He allegedly called three of the fired U.S. attorneys [Charlton, McKay, and Cummins] and made an implicit threat that the Justice Department would detail the reasons for their firings if they didn't stay quiet.
-- He allegedly rejected a large number of applicants to Justice Department positions because they were Democrats.
-- When Carol Lam, the former U.S. attorney for San Diego, asked to stay on the job longer in order to deal with some outstanding prosecutions (the expanding Duke Cunningham case among them), Elston told her not to think about her cases, that she should be gone in "weeks, not months" and said "these instructions were 'coming from the very highest levels of the government.'"
-- He called around to the U.S. attorneys whom he had placed on one of the draft firing lists to apologize when he discovered that his list would be turned over to Congress.Let me get this straight: Schlozman fingered Elston in getting approval for the ACORN indictments by going over Craig Donsanto's head. As Corpus Juris explained, "...everyone agrees the indictments flew in the face of Donsanto's own manual, DoJ rules and long standing tradition." And now Elston plans to leave the DOJ. Uh-huh.
The rats are deserting the sinking ship at the Bush Administration's DOJ. Now if only the WH firewall, er, I mean AG Gonzales would resign. But don't hold your breath.
POSTSCRIPT: Background on the ACORN indictments are here and here and here.
UPDATE: WaPo adds a few details and a statement from Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY):
"Alberto Gonzales appears to be the last man standing, but he should have been the first to go," Schumer said. "Almost every official involved in the U.S. attorney firings is gone, but that doesn't change the simple fact that the buck stops with the attorney general."Indeed.
